★★½
“Derailed train of thought.”
I guess this is a slightly different take on the typically heroic stories to come out of Russia concerning their battles against Germany in World War II. Rather than focusing on members of the military, it’s the story of civilians – many with little or no previous experience – who were brought in to keep the railway supply line to Leningrad open. These wee crucial to the city’s survival, as the Nazi blockade threatened to starve the city into submission, being responsible for thee-quarters of the resources going into the city. Naturally, the German forces wanted to cut this off, so subjected the tracks and trains to a relentless bombardment, from artillery, mortars and planes, placing those operating the trains in near-constant danger.
With a severe shortage of engineers and staff, it’s very much a case of all hands available. Which is how Masha (Tsibizova) and Sonya (Smirnova-Katsagadzhieva), barely out of school, find themselves assigned to the 48th Locomotive Unit, after the most basic of basic training in how to operate a train. This comes courtesy of Georgi (Alekseev), one of the few people around with relevant experience. The otherwise novice crew have to handle dangerous terrain and the ever-present threat of German attack, as they ferry supplies in to the besieged city. Things get murky, when they evacuate orphans out in a Red Cross train: but there are those in the Soviet administration who want to take this opportunity to piggyback on to this, a considerably less humanitarian mission.
It’s alright, I suppose. But it’s largely predictable, with elements such as the burgeoning romance between Masha and Georgi being straight out of the usual playbook. It’s also so unremittingly heroic as to feel like it might have been a product from the Soviet Ministry of Propaganda, in the later stages of the war. There are a couple of interesting touches: the nearest we get to seeing the enemy is a pilot who bails out when his plane is shot down, and is immediately beaten to death with shovels. Otherwise, the closest to an antagonist is one of the crew who turns out to be a saboteur. It does mean there’s not much sense of direct conflict, with no specific “villain”.
There’s a lot of train stuff here, to the extent that it feels occasionally to border on railway porn. If you are not a train spotter, this could feel overdone, and at a hundred and forty minutes, there feels like a lot of time to fill. Our heroines do get more back-burnered than I would prefer, in favour of their mail colleagues in the second half, though the climactic run, involving the orphan-laden train, requires full commitment from everyone. And, to my complete lack of surprise, no shortage of heroic and ultimate sacrifice. By this point, however, I’d gone beyond my capacity for footage of trains going through the forest, and I’d be lying if I said I cared more than on the most superficial of levels.
Dir: Fedor Popov
Star: Svetlana Smirnova-Katsagadzhieva, Artem Alekseev, Anastasia Tsibizova, Igor Yasulovich